Vigil (26 page)

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Romania

It was at the end that I painted my best and my last picture. It wasn’t of my wife. It had gone too far by then. It was just what remained at the end. But I could remember what she had been like by looking at the picture. I could remember her face as long as I could keep the painting.

             
I was watching her sleep. Her breath was hitching in her throat. Her hair was thinner, toward the end. It didn’t have the vibrancy it had had in life. Her face was almost gaunt. Although I pretty much forced her to eat toward the end she couldn’t keep anything down for long. I think she would have starved to death in the end.

             
That’s the bastard of cancer. It’s like a slow thief. One that makes its home in your body and steals away everything that made you.

             
It stole her beauty and even her mind, right at the very end. I should have known better, I suppose. I knew it wasn’t really her that asked me to change her. But by then I wasn’t myself, either. I tell myself that each time I think of her. Her cancer had destroyed my resolve, too.

             
It took from both of us, in its way.

             
Her breathing was ragged and her face pinched in pain. She opened her eyes and looked at me. She tried to smile but she could not.

             
‘I think this is the end,’ she said. ‘Show me your painting.’

             
Sadly, I turned the picture around, so that she could see herself on the second canvas. I had learned well. There was a semblance of her face there for her to see, but I had tried to flesh out her features from memory. I wanted to remember her the way she was, not as the ghost that lay on the bed before me, stripped bare of all that had made her beautiful.

             
She looked at it for a short while. Then she shook her head.

             
‘It is a good painting,’ she said, ‘but it is a lie.’

             
I knew the truth of this myself.

             
‘I wanted to remember you as you were. Full of life.’ I searched for the right word. ‘Luscious.’ I said. I sounded wrong, but it was the closest I could get. Some beauty transcends words.

             
She seemed pleased, nonetheless. Perhaps I had not praised her beauty enough in life.

             
She pursed her lips in thought. Once, that expression had been unconscious. Now it seemed like a parody of herself. Her lips were cracked and thin where once they had been full and prone to smiling.

             
‘I want you to remember me as I was. I want you to have your picture.’

             
I could see where she was going, so I shook my head firmly. ‘We have spoken about that. It is not what you truly want.’

             
‘No. I am not such a fool as to think that I could live as you. I want you to make me as you are. I want to feel life flowing through me again. Then you can have your picture.’

             
‘But you will no longer be you.’

             
‘For the picture it will do.’ She had that expression on her face now, the one that would brook no arguments. That one had not faded with sickness.

             
‘You will bind me. You will make me whole. Then you will paint me.’

             
‘I cannot.’

             
She reached out for me. I left my chair and went to her side.

             
‘This is the last thing I want. You have given me a gift. Now I will give one to you. Do not waste time arguing with me. It will be as I said.’

             
‘And when I have my painting and I have lost my wife?’

             
‘You have lost your wife to sickness already. Do not speak of it. We know what must happen. I know you are strong. I know you can do it. Do not deny me this. It is the last thing I wish for. I wish to feel what you feel. If only for a short time.’

             
She said what needed to be said without directness, as she often did.

             
I turned without speaking and left the small caravan that we called home.

             
I took the horses’ harnesses and made them into bindings. I returned and silently bound her tightly to the bed. I knew the strength that would course through her veins soon enough. I knew all too well the idiot hunger that would take her as it made her whole.

             
I cinched the bonds as tight as I could. She did not wince with the pain. I suppose it was nothing to the pain she felt inside.

             
When I was done I sat on the edge of her sick bed and stared into her eyes for a long time. She watched me patiently until she finally said, ‘goodbye.’

             
‘Goodbye,’ I told her, with the red mist over my eyes. Then I gave her my kiss. The first and last kiss I have ever given a woman.

             
I sat back on the edge of the bed. I wished I had said more. Her eyes glazed and I thought of all the words that I had in my head that I could have shared with her. I thought of all the touches and the dances that we could have had. I wavered for a moment. I imagined what our life would be like, an eternity, dancing the dance of blood.

             
But that would be a betrayal.

             
She let out a howl of agony. I knew the pain the healing brought. Her body had been all but destroyed by the cancer. Now she was having the reverse of that pain all at once.

             
She thrashed but the bindings held tight. She bucked and spat. She drew blood from her own lips.

             
Her hair began to grow back, thick and glowing, shining in the light of the day. She squeezed her eyes shut. I remembered the pain of waking all too well. I have never forgotten that, although I have forgotten much over the long years.

             
I watched her colour return as her agony grew.

             
The hunger was in her eyes. It wasn’t her. But it was close enough. Perhaps I could remember her light and not the hunger. Perhaps I could capture her beauty and my memory in equal proportion in my painting.

             
I took up the third and last of my canvasses and with what I knew, and my thrashing, screaming subject, I began to paint.

             
The time I spent with my wife, those last few hours, painting and bearing her screaming and her pleading, her hungry cries…like so much of the landscape of a marriage, that is a secret place. I will not share those hours.

             
They are mine. My burden to bear. Like so many others.

             
As night fell and my eyes calmed I stared down at the picture I had made.

             
The colours were perfect. The strokes were not as accomplished as some other artist’s might be. But it was an honest picture painted from a lie.

             
In its way, that was the truth of our marriage, and I thought it fitting that the lie was captured for all eternity. I could remember the pain and the joy of our marriage with this canvas to remind me.

             
It was the first time I ever had a possession. She was never mine to own. Who can own a life apart from their own? Even in marriage, there is no ownership. It is sharing. If you try to possess your wife or your husband you cannot help but fail. But share with them, share of yourself, and you will be free to love.

             
I did not kiss her. She was no longer my wife. I put the painting by the door. She railed against me, crying out, pleading. I hardened my heart. I lit a candle and placed it under the curtain.

             
With tender hands for what she had once been I reached out and held her fast. Then I tore her head from her shoulders with a powerful quick motion. I did not look into her eyes.

             
I laid her head in her lap and left the caravan burning behind me. I had my painting. I had my love and my memories.

             
A painting lasts longer than both.

*

Chapter
Sixty

Year – 0046

Fallon Corp. Research Complex

Level Two

Four soldiers stood, weapons poised, beside their fallen friends. They were the pinnacle of evolution, driven by mankind’s science. They were about to die.

             
The four soldiers had arrived as the last of their comrades fell. Had they come sooner, perhaps they would have fed on their friends, men who had once fought by their side against the vampire kin.

             
Now, armed with the ammunition and grenades from the fallen, they waited for the next wave. Vampires had already fallen to their silver-tipped bullets. They had taken the vampire army by surprise and driven them back from this, the last barricade before the stairwell leading to level three, where the evacuation to the lower levels and fading hope was continuing.

             
The soldiers had taken wounds themselves. Their wounds, however, closed quickly. The elder vampires they faced did not have silver weapons.

             
Paulo, once a fifty year old veteran of battles too numerous to count, was now something else entirely. He had been fighting against the vampire enemy for as long as he could remember. Once he had dreamed of a world with a cure for the vampire infection, a return to the things he had read of in books. A world where being run over had been the biggest threat topside. A world where men were free to grow old. He had once wanted to father children. He had never been still enough to do it. The fighting was constant.

             
Now he would never father children. He was a vampire, something different to the elders, something different to men. A creature in between, no place defined.

             
The rifle that rested against his shoulder was heavy. He did not feel the weight. His arms were steady. 

             
He was under no illusions. There were too many vampires for them to destroy utterly. Already his team had taken two rounds from a rocket launcher. Their wounds had healed, but without fresh blood they could not heal completely. The elder vampires were in the same situation, though. Their wounds were just as grievous.

             
‘Paulo…’ began Samuel. Paulo held up a hand for Samuel to maintain silence. Samuel held his tongue. Paulo knew all too well what Samuel wanted.

             
The barricade was mostly a ruin of metal chairs and tables. The metal was warped from the heat of explosions, and the wooden surfaces still smouldered. It might slow a round or two from the vampire intruders, but it would not last long.

             
It had been hastily set up at the junction of the longest corridor and the emergency stairs.

             
There was no other choice but to hold this crumbling tower. Their grenades were not powerful enough to close the last stairwell. They would have to hold it with their lives. They did not know how long Tom would need to get through the gateway, but they could do nothing about that now. Each man had a soldier’s nature; pragmatic. They were all that stood between Tom’s success and the vampire army taking the world of the past. Paulo didn’t pretend to understand it. But then was the idea of another world, in a time before this one, so strange? A vampire himself, he fought for time in a world where vampires ruled the earth. A leap through time itself was but a small stretch of the imagination.

             
He had been hearing what Samuel had for a minute now. The vampires were staging. In a few moments they would come. Reinforcements had come along the corridor, waiting in cover at the junction between this corridor and the last. The stairwell for level one, the security and command level, and the stairs down to the lower level, were separate. That was the only reason the vampires were not already running amok in the lower levels.

             
But they could hold no longer.

             
Paulo listened to his own heart beat. His was no faster than his men. They were all calm. They had been born into a war. They knew nothing of fear.

             
Over the beating of their hearts they could all hear the soft footfalls of the vampires around the last corner. The steel walls were scarred by fire and bullets, marred in their perfection by the blood dripping from the shining steel. Here and there lights had been blown out and dark shadows played along the corridor.

             
The footsteps quickened. The first vampire to round the corner took a bullet in the thigh, but kept coming. Then the vampires were charging in force. They were faster than any human, but then Paulo and his men were just as fast and their bullets were dipped in silver.              

             
Their weapons crackled and bullets found their marks. The vampires screamed in rage and pain but kept coming. There was no time to take head shots. They fired at the vampires with everything they had. They hurled grenades into the mass and the vampires threw their own grenades. The noise was deafening, made all the more so by the soldiers’ acute hearing.

             
A bullet tore Paulo’s thumb from his hand and continued through his shoulder. A fragmentation grenade took his left eye, and the flame took some of the skin from that side of his face. He saw Samuel go down from a bullet to the neck. The blood did not pump, but it flowed slowly. His head was canted at an unnatural angle. Probably, his neck was broken.

             
Francois held his own, firing one handed, his right arm hanging loose in the socket where he had taken a bullet in the shoulder. There was nothing left but to go down firing.

             
Paulo emptied his clip at the screaming vampires. He could imagine their hunger. He took his knife from his belt and ran, screaming himself, into their midst. He slashed and bit, kicking and punching with his tremendous strength. Dimly, he was aware of Francois fighting beside him, giving his last breath to give the humans below the time they needed. He hoped it would be enough.

             
He was aware amidst the towering pain coming from many wounds that at some point the arm holding his knife had been torn from its socket.

             
He punched out with his remaining arm, and then that too would not respond to his thoughts. Then there was nothing.

             
The vampire army tore the last of the new breed limb from limb.

             
A vampire rounded the corner. He wore the uniform of a Lieutenant. There were stripes on his arm. It was the only sign that this cabal of vampires had something resembling a chain of command. They had adapted to the new environment, picking up the old ways.

             
The Lieutenant took a walkie talkie from his belt and clicked it three times. He could not speak because his throat was torn from chin to collarbone. The wound was closing, but slowly as there was no blood to be had. He imagined the feast waiting below and tempered his hunger.

             
He could wait.

             
Light footsteps rounded the corner. He turned to look.

             
He growled, the only sound he could make. In a vampire it was just a bestial response to a creature more powerful. A pack leader.